


Fueled By Blood, Saved By Music

by QuagmireMarch



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Enabled by Waffle, Happy Ending, Horror-ish, M/M, another weird one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:55:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26396002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuagmireMarch/pseuds/QuagmireMarch
Summary: The ghosts need to take the blood of their victims to continue their existence. One ghost finds himself wanting something different.
Relationships: Leo de la Iglesia/Ji Guang-Hong
Kudos: 6
Collections: Urban Legends on Ice, YOI Grand Prix Week





	Fueled By Blood, Saved By Music

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, this is inspired by the Beijing's Ghost Bus urban legend. Very creepy. It's also my entry for Day 4 of the Grand Prix Week. 
> 
> If people want to know more about that or, really just hang out with cool YOI fans, check out the 18+ YOI Discord server. https://discord.gg/TYMxcAB

The first thing Guang Hong--not his name before but that is lost, and it is the one he wears now--remembers is meeting Leo de Inglesia, and that he recalls with the soft edges and hazy of a dream. It starts on a bus. Guang Hong, hair messy and chest hurting, is with the guards. They wear their robes, familiar and proper, but the others around them are dressed oddly. In alien fabrics. A tired woman with a young boy is in pants. An old woman who keeps looking around as if trying to flee has some rigid plastic garb about her. And _him,_ the lovely boy with warm eyes that catch Guang Hong’s as he passes, he wears canvas leggings and bright colors.

They take their seats in the back as they do every turning of this cycle, waiting for the time when they shall take their tolls. Guang Hong hopes the brown-eyed boy will get off before then. He knows this night will end in blood for that is the fuel needed to rest for another hundred years, but that does not mean he takes pleasure in the need at any time. To do so from one that speaks so of kindness, he feels would be an even greater crime.

But then, Guang Hong had committed many of those. He doesn’t remember them, but his guards whisper stories in his ear as they drag him through his torment. Whispers of wars and deaths and sins committed in Guang Hong’s name. Crimes that continue each time they appear to take a carriage or a train or a bus to find their way back to brief peace, their conveyance always fueled by the blood of the other passengers.

One day it might be enough to get him all the way out of this torment. But tonight his thoughts are not for his escape, but for his. The long-haired boy with the gentle eyes. He’s currently staring out the window, music softly escaping into the air around him. Guang Hong hopes he gets off the bus soon.

There are only two more stops before the reservoir. The boy doesn’t step off at the first though the old woman tells him he should. But he just looks confused. He doesn’t speak the language. She gives up, flees. She knows what Guang Hong and his guards are. She’d seen they had no legs beneath their robes.

It is a required warning they must provide. Guang Hong is surprised anyone noticed.

As they approach the last stop, Guang Hong lets his energy wander, brushes the minds of those around him. Learns them. The woman and her son are heading home after a competition, figure skating. The boy didn’t do well. He’s too weak, the sickness in his blood slowly spreading.

He’s dying.

His mother doesn’t know. She thinks he is tired from the skating, stress making him thin. Surely, she thinks if it were more he’d have said something, told her.

Guang Hong wonders why he didn’t. He suspects he knows. Some souls do not long for the physical. He thinks perhaps the boy finds the weight of a body a burden. Thinks it tragic the two could not switch for he’d give anything to bear that weight again. To have breath and words.

To know the lovely boy with the music.

Perhaps it is the shared wish of something else, perhaps the draw of magic in the night, but Guang Hong feels himself pulled into the boy, drawn down and inward, expelling death and consuming blood gone bad with a withered soul, and filling it back up with longing and hope.   
  
  
A different kind of passage, but a toll paid all the same.

Blinking with these new, living eyes, he goes to the lovely boy and takes his hand, pulls him to his feet. He knows the words won’t matter, so he uses none. He takes the device that creates the music, and as the bus lurches to a stop, he runs.

He calls for the boy to follow, and he does, the mother apologizing the whole time as they step from the bus. Guang Hong waits until the bus rolls on before he lets them catch him. He finds out they all speak English, but he doesn’t explain. Never explains even many years later.

The next day he asks his mother to take him to the doctor. Leo, because he is asked, goes with them. The cancer is found, can be treated. For the first time in centuries Guang Hong will live.


End file.
